[scroll through the Spotify playlist above to see the track progression]
Every summer, my parents throw at least one rager in the backyard. Everyone in the family (plus a special guest or two) is tasked with some form of party prep. This year my husband Marshall and me were asked to create a playlist for the party with a few parameters ...
"Must include Ted Hawkins,"Bring It On Home, Daddy,” David Lindley, and El Rayo X “Gimme Da Ting,” James, “Laid” & Talking Heads, “I Zimbra”... oh, and if it could be six hours long that would be great."
In the true spirit of procrastination, we put this task off until our drive to Eugene from Portland, Oregon. We started by listing all the bands my parents and their "hippy" yet also "hip" friends might enjoy. We came up with about 32 bands pretty quickly. From there, we decided to add two or three songs from each band to a playlist on Spotify.
But where do you go from there? Should we just hit shuffle and see how it goes? Nah.
We decided to consult Google and almost immediately found Sort Your Music. If you don't use Spotify (a cringy topic these days, I know), then this whole read is irrelevant.
Sort Your Music is a tool explicitly built to sort Spotify playlists by various parameters.
To check it out, follow this link and then follow these steps:
Login with your Spotify credentials
Pick your playlist
Sort the playlist by clicking on the column headings in the playlist table
Save the sorted playlist to Spotify
Sort Your Music lets you sort your playlist based on several Echo Nest song attributes, including:
Beats Per Minute (BPM) - The tempo of the song.
Energy - The energy of a song - the higher the value, the more energetic the song
Danceability - The higher the value, the easier it is to dance to this song.
Loudness - The higher the value, the louder the song.
Valence - The higher the value, the more positive mood for the song.
Length - The duration of the song.
Acoustic - The higher the value, the more acoustic the song is.
Popularity - The higher the value, the more popular the song is.
Rnd - A random number. Sort by this column to shuffle your playlist.
We opted to sort our playlist by energy (decreasing energy to increasing energy), and as our spooky luck would have it, the last guest left the party as the final track played.